Two books are recommended in honor horror of the swine flu outbreak that is killing people in Mexico. The flu has a great and lethal history in the United States and around the world. The last huge influenza pandemic was in 1918, ennabled by WWI troop movements and the shroud of secrecy President Woodrow Wilson’s government threw over everything to preserve morale and morality.

A new pandemic is inevitable — viruses can mutate faster than we can defeat them.

The first book offered for your consideration is The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry.

I can’t get rid of some of visuals this book planted in my brain — a man getting off a street car because passengers kept collapsing, bodies in piles because there was no place else to put them. This book does have a problem that afflicts so many non-fiction books in the computer age — there is too much middle in the middle. It’s too late to submit this to an editor, so some page skipping is acceptable.

The second book is a novel — Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day.

This book is not about the flu, though the flu plays a prominent role. It’s about 1918 Boston, mostly. It’s a sprawling family epic written about a sprawling time in a major American city. There is love and hate, war and peace, labor strife and race relations, and a cop family trying to survive it all. This is a great book — a page-turner from beginning to end.